Whalin’ at JPM. Really unhappy with the feed difficulties I had with the hearings, and thanks for the reader discussion:

Senate Subcommittee Feasting On Whale Today Matt Levine. I’m glad Levine come around to recognizing there was a problem, but it’s still pretty astonishing that some people don’t get the significance of what was already public. 1Q 2012 earnings were restated, the accountant’s statement was qualified and the oversight for marking positions was within the CIO (an astonishingly irregular fox running the henhouse policy).

bmeisen, Before there were derivates, naked CDO’s to the nth, and HFT for the skim at the speed of light, there was what you’ll find linked below. As PT Barnum averred, “There’s a sucker born every minute” — especially in America; and this is what the Global Reich .01% counts on in every age. Funny how that old “Russian”/”Anglo-American Establishment” symbiosis keeps popping up. They sure can scam the suckers together to advance the NWO and that old-time “New Age” One World Religion out of British Raj India.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzlowBYc3Eo
“Mme. Blavatsky.wmv”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlV2vFXRzes
“Gurdjieff, Blavatsky and the Roerich’s 4.4.17”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Roerich
/In 1929 Nicholas Roerich was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the University of Paris.[4] He received two more nominations in 1932 and 1935.[5] His concern for peace led to his creation of the Pax Cultura, the “Red Cross” of art and culture. His work in this area also led the United States and the twenty other members of the Pan-American Union to sign the Roerich Pact on April 15, 1935 at the White House. The Roerich Pact is an early international instrument protecting cultural property./
/Vice President of the United States Henry A. Wallace was a frequent correspondent and sometime follower of Roerich’s teachings. This became controversial when Wallace ran for President in 1948 and portions of the correspondence were printed by Hearst Newspapers columnist Westbrook Pegler, becoming known as the “Guru Letters”.//

A sample: ‘It is easily overlooked nowadays, but fascism at its heart was a leftist movement. Mussolini never made a secret of his origins: “I am and always will be a socialist. My convictions will never change. They are implanted into my bones,” he told his comrades as they expelled him from the party at the outbreak of war in 1914 because of his pro-war stance… “Mussolini’s fascism was black, Grillo’s is green, but they both have a red heart.”‘

By imposing austerity on much of southern European periphery countries, the so called ‘Troika’ is actually fuelling radical nationalist forces in many of the countries suffering from its economic prescriptions.

Given Merkel and the Bundesbank are presently ardent austerians, perhaps Der Spiegel could focus on analysing what forces persons into the arms of radical nationalist and populist movements, rather than castigating those that offer a way out for those on the receiving end of these insane policies.

Further, whilst Mussolini was no angel, compared to the mad Austrian himself, Hitler, he was a paragon of virtue.

What amuses me the most however, is the fact that TPTB seem rather surprised by the forces they unleash by their idiotic economic policies, particularly when said forces have a tendency to bite them on the arse.

In a nutshell, if you desire to live in a sane social democratic world, its necessary to embrace economic policies that facilitate this, rather than policies that protect the economic interests of a tiny minority at the expense of the majority.

Der Spiegel has stooped to the worst sort of lying in the service of politics.

Maybe a little history lesson is in order in what is a long-running battle between the two political extremes represented in the thinking of Hobbes and Rousseau. First, Reinhold Niebuhr:

[T]he excessive individualism and libertarianism of the bourgeois world…promted a civil war in the whole Western world in which the rising proletarian classes pitted an excessive collectivism against the false individualism of middle class life… The success of Nazi diplomacy and propaganda in claiming the poor in democratic civilization as their allies against the “plutocrats” in one moment, and in the next seeking to ally the privileged classes in their battle against “communism,” is a nice indication of the part which the civil war in democratic civilization played in allowing barbarism to come so near to a triumph over civilization.

— REINHOLD NIEBUHR, “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness”

Next is this from George Orwell:

THE backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially the urban trade union members. In the long run — it is important to remember that it is only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of fascism, simply because the working class stands to gain most by a decent reconstitution of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed…

Too ignorant to see through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements.

— GEORGE ORWELL, “Looking Back on the Spanish War”

And finally another quote by Orwell. Speaking of Britain’s lords of capital, he notes

To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of socialism, which would have forced them to realise that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient, and out of date… After years of aggressoin and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes.

“T]he excessive individualism and libertarianism of the bourgeois world…promted a civil war in the whole Western world in which the rising proletarian classes pitted an excessive collectivism against the false individualism of middle class life…”

Can’t be repeated enough because here we (collectively) still are, battling away, jawing on about the virtues of libertarianism, the complete responsibility of the individual, and the hell of Stalin, while intercontinental wounds gape and run. Pitiful.

“The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements.”

So Der Spiegel has no responsibility for the distortions, half-truths and outright lies it publishes? Its editors have no responsiblity to fact check what it publishes, and when it comes to opinion pieces, it’s anything goes — the sky’s the limit when it comes to publishing disinformation and misinformation?

Maybe so, maybe not, but it seems to me the convention in publishing is to cite the author, for example a piece by David Brooks or Paul Krugman (who are each of them quite likely to distort the truth on any given day) in the NYT would typically be listed by author, occasionally the publication would also be cited.

no, unfortunately there is no such thing in Germany like a well-circulated socialist-leaning bi-lingual newspaper, most papers in Germany belong to one of the big corporations like springer or bertellsmann. The media concentration process has destroyed any kind of plurality there, at least any socialist-leaning. That’s the reason I mostly read blogs (a very good one is nachdenkseiten) or smaller papers, but none of them are bi-lingual

thanks for recommending the comments section. I did home health care for years at 8/hour simply because I could work 60-70 hours a week doing overnight shifts. that was the only way to pay the bills, work more. it’s a dreadful and often sad job. But I think it’s really important for people to know what life is like at the end.

In Mexico, I hear that physicians are required to work for free for a year in clinics before they go on to make the big bucks. I wish college kids had to do year of home healthcare at minimum wage before they received their degrees here in the states. Not only would they no longer believe it when the obit reads “died peacefully at home” but they’d learn a little compassion and hopefully also learn to respect their elders. Plus those young libertarians that want to do away with minimum wage might learn a thing or two as well.

Is it necessary to have to read a headline about a frog giving birth through it’s mouth while I gently awake with a bran muffin and cup of coffee. I have a sensitive imagination and it seems like a form of puking.

from article:”Dimon himself has always maintained that he knew very little about the way the London Whale trade metastasized.”

being the quote demon i am…i cant help myself:

“Just because we’re stupid doesn’t mean everybody else was.”
— Dimon on a May 11 conference call announcing the $2 billion loss, rejecting the notion that more regulation is needed to stem such instances.

“These people are patriots-not mercenaries-who are allowing us to take control of our destiny.”
— Dimon wrote these words in a 2002 annual report of Bank One, where he was chairman before it merged with JPMorgan Chase. He was referring to the bank’s hiring of 1,700 IT professionals over the previous year-and-a-half. Dimon was known as an advocate for “insourcing” and keeping technology in-house rather than outsourcing it to outside firms.

In a ruling arising from the Amaranth case, D.C. Appeals Court holds that FERC can’t regulate manipulation of gas and oil prices/supply if the manipulation involves futures contracts. CFTC held to be only agency with jurisdiction. Note that FERC was given enhanced powers over futures manipulating gas and oil in the wake of Enron’s schemes, which resulted in severa energy shortages (and price gouging) in California.

And so the realm of speculative finance (looting real world assets) is deemed untouchable by regulators dealing with real world assets.

Note too: FERC’s history of fines against manipulators — massive — compared to the ridiculously miniscule fines imposed by CFTC. I think interested “stakeholders” determined that FERC was getting just a little too effective in doing its job.

Yves, to me, bottled water has always been a symbol of neoliberal policies. The govt provides ppl with drinking water out of their taps at their homes for a very small cost. Yet, everyone says the water is tainted with fluoride which the govt uses to control you. And the water doesn’t always taste like a spring. So here comes Mr. Market to the rescue! Wonderful bottled water. It’s cheap (sort of, if $1 for 12 oz of water, which magically falls free from the sky, is somehow cheap. Based upon what tho?). It’s filtered from impurities and it has these wonderful images of mountain springs where water is supposed to be clean and fresh and nontoxic.
So you have the govt version that works in a pinch and is full of mind control agents. Then you have the free market version, which no one really knows what’s in it, but it’s from a mountain spring! So all our wonderful free market supporters can say ‘the govt can’t even provide water, if you want clean water u gotta work hard to pay for it, that’s the reward of hard work’. And if u are a real hard worker, you can afford the really good bottled water, like avian. And if you are poor, you drink tap or cheap dollar store bottled water. Everyone can know whether you are a hard worker or a lazy welfare freeloader by the type of water you drink.

Bottled water is just as much a part of the extractive economy as fracking, mountaintop removal, or big coal. The rentiers use the same playbook against the locals; only the material substrate changes.

Yves – I have to say that the information out of the Senate Hearing yesterday and nearly full airing of the blatant lawlessness of JP Morgan Chase may be the most important story of the TBTF era. This information should lead to prosecutions, the removal of the perpetrators and their lieutenants, the break up of these completely corrupt and criminal enterprises known as “banks”. The facts about the cost they have paid for being criminals is astounding:
“Rosner found out, Chase has paid a stunning $8 billion in settlements in the years 2009-2012, and spent $16 billion in legal defense fees during that same period, which means that fully one third of Chase’s net income has been spent on the cost of doing bad business, i.e. cleaning up after its high risk and/or illegal behavior.” Taibbi
In effing credible. The leeching of our economy has been disastrous for the poor, I see the impacts for those who are barely hanging on to their lives and dignity every day. There is no excuse for this except we have lost our moral compass and replaced it with some Nietzschean Will to Power belief system that is strangling all the goodwill and community from our culture and government.

This is the sort of loose thread the Republican House “could” pull on to begin Hearings on Articles of Impeachment against Holder and against Obama itself. “Could” but “won’t”, because the Republican Housemembers love serial gang banker criminals more than they hate Obama itself.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said during an interview with CNBC Squawk Box that he doesn’t see any “irrational exuberance” in today’s stock market. Giving his opinion on the current economy, Alan Greenspan said the markets are “significantly undervalued.”

It is rich to hear from a man who many argue helped cause the biggest bubble in history state that [one] does not exist today.

When asked if the Federal Reserve’s asset purchase program is responsible for the rally, he immediately dismissed the idea.

Whoever decided to roll him out to make this utterance either has a snarky sense of humor or is apparently convinced that there’s lots of Dumb Money ready to jump into the bubble that’s been primed for the last 5 years.

Greenspan was merely speaking to advance the Bernanke Fed agenda. He was trying to create a psychological manipulation “pull” INto the Stock Market for millions of small savers being “pushed” OUT of savings by forced-Zero interest rates on their savings. I suspect a lot of these savers understand esACTly the carrot-stick (or should I say backscratcher-tireiron) methods being employed by the Dynamic Duo of Greenspan and Bernanke. Hopefully some of them can take the pain of Zero return on savings longer than Greenspan-Bernanke can inflict that pain.

Please let Google Reader die. Google with its weight waded into what used to be a vibrant RSS ecosystem and slowly strangled it. We do not need a dominant player like Google that can so adversely affect such a simple way of organizing the internet. Already many other sources are stepping up to the plate and soon enough the pains of the transition will be forgotten.

Please do not support Google holding on to the monopoly its had on RSS.

Somehow by spinning off the water authority, it will have the ability to get 40 year low interest rate financing. Yet the city can’t get this?
Quite amazing how the powers that be are using the salami kilpatrick indictments to privatize the city of Detroit.

After a little digging I discovered Detroit is the only city that does not charge it’s municipalities for use of the city’s water system. It’s against the law apparently. So all those poor blacks that live in Detroit have to financially support the wealthy white suburbs water usage. So instead of charging for the use, it’s better to privatize, then the poor ppl can pay inflated rates while the wealthy white folks can complain about how the lazy black ppl in Detroit live on welfare.

Euro-area finance ministers agreed to an unprecedented tax on Cypriot bank deposits as officials unveiled a 10 billion-euro ($13 billion) rescue plan for the country, the fifth since Europe’s debt crisis broke out in 2009.

Cyprus will impose a levy of 6.75 percent on deposits of less than 100,000 euros — the ceiling for European Union account insurance — and 9.9 percent above that. The measures will raise 5.8 billion euros, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who leads the group of euro-area ministers, told reporters early today after 10 hours of talks in Brussels.

Funds to pay the levy were frozen in accounts immediately, ECB Executive Board Member Joerg Asmussen said. The levy will be assessed before Cypriot banks reopen on March 19 after a March 18 national holiday. Sarris said electronic transfers will also be limited until then.

EU Commissioner Olli Rehn called the assessment a strictly fiscal measure. Rehn had warned against so-called haircuts on depositors to avoid setting a destabilizing precedent. When asked if a deposit assessment could be ruled out for future rescues, Rehn said in an interview: “It can and there is no concrete case where it should be considered.”

One thing (among others) that niggles, about the piece about Cali being the only state to confiscate firearms, is this sentence fragment:

deemed mentally unstable.

Cali is loaded with thoroughly corrupted politicians, who most assuredly live in fear of being targeted by those they’ve brutalized, despite the fact that those they’ve brutalized are mostly peace loving persons trying to survive without tormenting anyone else. And as much as they may despise their political Representatives™, they would never shoot them in cold blood. Given that, I’m sure there a shitload of Cali citizens who’ve been labeled Mentally Unstable, along with a shitload of citizens who have been institutionalized after trying every peaceful thing they could to survive, and consequently failing to: shattering, emotionally and certainly economically, under the burden. I’m guessing that one huge concern is that the fockers would not want any of their victims committing suicide and leaving that telltale note behind.

In other words, the only concern the STATE of California has about violence is that it not be directed towards that STATE, the largest perpetrator of Mental, and Physical violence …in the ‘state’ of California.

(for those unfamiliar, PwC stands for: PriceWaterhouseCoopers[& Lybrand], one of the Big Four Oligarchic Audit [Accounting! [for some handful of monsters]] firms whose responsibility has been declared to be ensuring that Corporations aren’t being run by thieves.

Dickens’ Scrooge [an Accountant!] was an absolute saint as to what has been allowed to remain of London Corp., etcetera, and absolutely thrive, amongst misery for most. One might compare PwC’s actions to a police officer deliberately blinking and looking the other way while some ‘nobody’ was assaulted by thugs.)

One might compare PwC’s actions to a police officer deliberately blinking and looking the other way while some ‘nobody’ was assaulted by thugs.)

And making an ob$cene profit while doing $o. (Although, the cop was likely initially held under political/economic duress, unlike the upper echelon$ of the Big Four, who just cannot seem to get enough $, and POWER over others.)

Yves, very, very sorry for addressing you as Jeralyn (of TalkLeft), a severe, overloaded mind burp. I much appreciate Jeralyn when she gets beyond insidiously pom pomming for DemRats (notice the absence of Open threads™ upon the inception of the Sequester™ at TalkLeft), and taking up defense for those with plenty money to buy the courts, before taking up defense for those who don’t.

Again, very sorry, I don’t at all consider you as having a similar mentality to Jeralyn’s.

That, is not at all to say that those commenting At Jeralyn’s blawg …are similar to her mentality, I’ve fallen in human love with many of them (and I certainly don’t loath Jeralyn, I just believe she needs to take quite a bit of time, ….to consider others of different, far lesser enabled: financial/power/considered physically attractive circumstances, …outside of her own circumstances)

Obama’s legacy? Nothing more than his crimes. Acquiescence to torture because he’s scared of his knuckledraggers, instigation of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment inflicting severe mental and physical suffering. Ordering executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court, without indispensable judicial guarantees. Wilful killing of protected persons. Abuse of function to provide impunity for illegal mass evictions, financial fraud and theft of unprecedented scale, and destruction of fisheries and foodstocks in the Gulf of Mexico.

Though he’ll basically remain an embarrassing footnote to history, academic biographers may get some sordid yuks out of Obama’s lifetime of kissing his betters’ ass and stomping on the weak as a supercilious button man for bankers and the CIA. Obama will be vaguely remembered with queasy distaste as a third-rate child of privilege who rose to be America’s most despicable president.

If you really want to slough off Dem fans cheering war from the bleachers, just quote Bill Graham, Foreign Minister of Canada under Chretien,

“Since the Iraq War, international law and the rules that govern state conduct have changed a lot. … If you enter into a war where it’s not considered legitimate by the international community, you are on very, very dangerous ground.

“The difference between the way the Americans have handled Iraq and Syria is not just a difference between Bush and Obama. It’s the result of a learning experience that if you flout international law, you’re going to have to pay some consequences.

“… States are much more conscious of international legal constraints.”

As CIA puppet rulers in our north american banana republic, Bush and Obama are interchangeable war salesmen. The only difference is, Obama’s CIA handlers are afraid of the consequences of criminal aggression. They’re waging their new war in Syria surreptitiously so they can lie about it. And they’re scaling back illegal use of force to skirt the legal threshold of ‘most serious crimes’ by committing mass murders in onesies and twosies with death squads and missiles from drones. Obama is trying to take the credit for legal inhibitions on US government aggression. Dem dupes fall for it every time.

Obama’s going to commit whatever crime he’s told to. He thinks he’s too much of a big shot to ever be the scapegoat. When the world corners this criminal state, Obama is liable to find out what a powerless, isolated pissant he actually is. He’s just virginal enough to sacrifice to the volcano. Obama’s ultimate disgrace will be a tradecraft classic of ego-up recruitment of a patsy.

so was the $600mm insider fine a loss for the SEC/DOJ or win? I think it must be a loss right? I mean they put the galleon guy away, they must have had a lot with regards to sac yet ultimately all they got was the $600mm fine and no admission of guilt? almost like one of those deals that rakoff never blessed by the big banks.

Yves, regarding the gawker race article.
To me, terry Scott’s attitude is just like employers in the US. They think that my hard work and long hours are stealing from them. That somehow I don’t give back enough to the company. “I give my workers a paycheck and a roof over their heads while they work, they should be happy”. That’s what I hear.
The race war is not just over color. It’s about poor versus rich. The rich ppl make dumb white ppl think that their problems are because of ppl of color. And for whatever stupid reason, white ppl take out their frustrations on ppl of color instead of on rich ppl. Because one day, poor white ppl think that they will be rich white ppl.